Ishmael Reed

Ishmael Reed (born February 22, 1938, Chattanooga, Tennessee, U.S.) is an author of poetry, essays, novels, and plays who is perhaps best known for his fictional works, which are marked by surrealism, satire, and political and racial commentary. His novels include Mumbo Jumbo (1972), Flight to Canada (1976), and Japanese by Spring (1993).

Reed’s mother, Thelma Coleman Reed, and stepfather, Bennie Reed, moved their family from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Buffalo, New York, when Reed was four years old. In high school Reed worked for a local weekly newspaper, starting as a delivery boy and eventually becoming the paper’s jazz columnist. After graduating from high school, he took night classes at Millard Fillmore College before transferring to the State University of New York at Buffalo. While in college he became interested in Black folklore and theater.

In 1962 Reed moved to New York City, where he joined the Society of Umbra, a collective of Black avant-garde writers and artists. In 1965 he cofounded The East Village Other, an underground newspaper that achieved a national reputation. That same year he organized the American Festival of Negro Art. Reed later taught at several schools, most notably the University of California at Berkeley (1968–2005). In 1990 he founded Konch magazine, which began as a print publication and later moved to a digital-only format.

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Reed’s novels depict human history as a cycle of battles between oppressed people and their oppressors; their characters and plots are an antic mixture of inverted stereotypes, revisionist history, and prophecy. His first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers, was published in 1967. It centers on Bukka Doopeyduk, who launches a rebellion in the miserable nation of Harry Sam, ruled by the despotic Harry Sam. In the violent Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969) the hero is a Black circus cowboy with cloven hooves who goes by the name the Loop Garoo Kid. Mumbo Jumbo (1972), Reed’s most-celebrated novel, pits proponents of rationalism and militarism against believers in the magical and the intuitive. The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974) is a detective story set amid the racial violence of Berkeley in the 1960s. Flight to Canada (1976) depicts the anachronistic adventures of an enslaved man from the American Civil War era who escapes to freedom via bus and airplane.

Reed’s later novels include The Terrible Twos (1982), its sequels The Terrible Threes (1989) and The Terrible Fours (2021), Japanese by Spring (1993), Juice! (2011), and Conjugating Hindi (2018). He also published numerous volumes of poetry, notably Conjure (1972), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Chattanooga (1973); A Secretary to the Spirits (1978); New and Collected Poems, 1964–2006 (2006), which won the California Gold Medal in Poetry; and Why the Black Hole Sings the Blues: Poems, 2007–2020 (2020). Among his essay collections are Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media (2010) and Going Too Far: Essays About America’s Nervous Breakdown (2012). Six of Reed’s plays, including Mother Hubbard and The Preacher and the Rapper, were collected in a volume that was published in 2009.

In 2019 Reed achieved notoriety for his play The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda, which satirized composer and lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop musical Hamilton (2015). Although Miranda’s musical received awards and rave reviews for its use of contemporary music and a racially diverse cast to depict the life of U.S. Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, Reed told Current Affairs magazine that he disliked Hamilton because its creators “cast Black people in order to defend projects that [Black people] might find objectionable. It sort of distracts from the racism of the white historical characters.” Reed explained that he wrote The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda to “draw attention to what was left of out Hamilton by giving speaking parts to those who were left out of the narrative.” In 2023 Reed published the play The Slave Who Loved Caviar, which examines the fraught relationship between artists Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Reed’s other works include the biography The Complete Muhammad Ali, which was published in 2015. He has edited a number of anthologies and written several works that were released solely as online audiobooks, including Malcolm and Me (2020), a memoir of his experience interviewing Black nationalist leader Malcolm X in 1960, and the novella The Man Who Haunted Himself (2022). Reed has been the recipient of numerous honors, notably a MacArthur Fellowship (1998).

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